HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

THE WEIRD RIGHT WING WORLD

I'm watching the coverage of Senator Edward Kennedy's funeral and there is great sadness. The sadness is over the loss of Senator Kennedy, over the loss of JFK and RFK all those years ago, the loss of other great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. We don't have leaders of that caliber or that vision left. Edward Kennedy was the torch that still burned and now his life has been extinguished.

The Fresno Bee prints snippets of letters to give you an idea of the content. Lately, when I see the usual frothing of right-wing freaks I don't bother to read the rest. Today's sampling included the assertion that liberals think we have all the answers. No, we don't. If we did, the world would be far better than it is. The hateful right-wing philosophy of greed, exploitation, bigotry, war, and hate would be shoved to the back of the closet. But right-wing influence is everywhere in the media.

For right-wingers there is never enough prejudice, never enough inequality, never enough death and destruction. It's like a narcotic for them.

I hope that we not only have leaders like JFK, RFK, and Edward Kennedy, but that we collectively become like them. That is when things will truly change.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

THE RIGHT-WING ASSAULT ON ALL OF US

Maybe we need a new social science that combines aspects of political science, sociology, and psychology to analyze the behavior of the right wing in this country. It's a movement mostly moved by hate and paranoia. It's all emotion and no reason. Most of the knuckle draggers who fulminate against things like "socialized medicine" have no idea of what they're talking about. They've heard the talking points from the thugs who manipulate them, people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Gingrich, and Palin. They repeat those talking points endlessly. They talk about "freedom" while they busily go about denying freedom to their fellow citizens by threat and intimidation.

If we don't get national health care, it will be a national tragedy. We should have had national health care decades ago. But just as the vestiges of slavery endured for one hundred years after the Civil War--and still endures in many ways--we continue with the same broken and heartless system. Other countries have successfully implemented health care for their citizens but we, the "can do" country, can't do it because of the cruel and selfish ideologues on the political right. This editorial from The New York Times summarizes it well from www.nytimes.com:

If nothing is done to slow current trends, the number of people in this country without insurance or with inadequate coverage will continue to spiral upward. That would be a personal tragedy for many and a moral disgrace for the nation. It is also by no means cost-free. Any nation as rich as ours ought to guarantee health coverage for all of its residents.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

RIGHT WING WRECKAGE

It's ironic when you think about it. The traditional idea of conservatism is to conserve, to be cautious. What gets called "conservative" now is about destruction: destruction of the economy, destruction of the environment, destruction of civil liberties. It comes straight out of Orwell's 1984. The people who shout "freedom" are the destroyers of freedom.

Shakespeare described conservatives well when he wrote in A Midsummer's Night Dream: "The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion."

My prevailing mood these days is weariness. I have a job I absolutely loathe and can't leave because of the economic disaster left by the Bush administration. Hopes for universal health care, which this country desperately needs, appear to be dimming. The war in Afghanistan is actually escalating. News on the environmental front is constantly depressing. It seems the human race is determined to destroy our own planet. The "jaws of darkness" do indeed "devour it up."

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

REVERSE MIGRATION

A good friend is moving from California back to Texas this weekend. After years of working at a miserable job that we both hate, she has had enough. She and her husband are going back to Houston. Right-wingers always make it sound so simple. If you don't like your job, whatever, just quit. The problem is you need to find some income somewhere. The jobs aren't here now. Fresno has a miserable economy even in good national economic times. Thanks to Bush at the national level and a series of right-wing policies in this state, the economy lies in shambles. The Golden State has turned into lead.

This commentary by Marc Cooper is at www.thenation.com:

Aggravating matters, Governor Schwarzenegger took an intractable "no new taxes" position and then went a step further, saying the crisis was an opportunity to make "structural reforms." Translation: the governor demanded radical shrinkage of the public sector, including virtual abolition of CalWorks, the state welfare program, and a rollback of state employee pensions. He even threatened the "nuclear option": suspension of Prop 98, which requires that 40 percent of state revenues be channeled into schools. Four years ago, when Schwarzenegger attempted to impose a similar far-reaching conservative agenda through a set of referendums, he was mightily slapped down by voters and forced to apologize. Now, it seemed, he was trying to hold the state hostage to these draconian changes as the price of a budget deal. "He just got it in his head that his time is up and his legacy must be long-term reform," said Bebitch Jeffe. "So he's using the short-term budget as leverage. Either he doesn't understand, or he's taking a mammoth risk."

"Some of the cuts proposed by the governor are unimaginable," said Barbara O'Connor, political analyst at Cal State, Sacramento, a few days before the budget deal was reached. "In the end," she predicted, "it will be declared a win-win. No one will love it. Everyone will accept it."

Maybe. Because in the end, while Schwarzenegger was proposing Armageddon, the Democrats settled for mere catastrophe. When the budget details were unveiled, it was like viewing the emaciated corpse of a once great state. There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years. The deal called for almost $8 billion to be taken from education; more than $1 billion from state worker pay; an equal amount from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program; $375 million from CalWorks; $226 million from home healthcare, in which patients and caregivers will now have to be fingerprinted; $124 million from Healthy Families health insurance, which means thousands of children will be wait-listed for coverage; and more than $4 billion confiscated from local governments, which will create a ripple effect of collateral damage. The proposed taxes on oil extraction, tobacco sales and vehicle registration were penciled out; the budget was balanced only through a set of accounting gimmicks, which merely kicked the crisis down the road a few months. The only winners in this deal were felons, who won a $1.2 billion cut in prison funding, which would reduce the prison population by some 27,000.